


The Book that Eats

by OrsonZedd



Category: SCP Foundation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:06:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27072448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrsonZedd/pseuds/OrsonZedd
Summary: For Steven Jones, the most mundane of anomalies will be the beginning of his career with the Foundation at Site-11.
Kudos: 1





	1. Knowledge Esoterica

Secure Contain Protect  
Provisional Item No. PR-114864  
Description:  
PR-114864 is a leather bound journal measuring 6 inches by 9 inches made by the Conneticut Leather Company in 1974. It contains 300 pages of archival matte paper with a silk ribbon. Each of the pages continuously change their contents so that nothing can be read or interpreted from it. Attempting to may cause nausea or vomiting. Tests with highspeed cameras are ongoing.

It wasn’t much, Steven admitted, but it was a new candidate SCP, so there wasn’t much to do, other than prep its data entry and initial test results. The job had been billed as new and exciting opportunities in data entry, and certainly it was more exciting than entering balances into a spreadsheet all day. Site-11 was, however, a bit boring, compared to the stories he’d heard around the water cooler about strange anomalies at other sites. Site-11 had an ice cream cow, and that was it. This book, however, this “Knowledge Esoterica”, was unreadable and that placed it in league with lots of books in languages Steven didn’t know, and some he did, like Dune by Frank Herbert.  
He logged the new entry, and sighed, after a full week, this was all anyone knew about the book so far. But no one was sure to this point about its object class, so it was being closely monitored in an empty room and, if no other anomalies manifested from the book, that would probably be the end of the case file for some time until proper testing would begin.  
A week passed and Steven was again assigned to make observations of PR-114864 again. It was a Monday and the, it was hard not to think of it as a city, that Site-11 surrounded had all the amenities to make his weekend wild, and his Monday hungover. He didn’t follow proper protocol for exposure to these kinds of SCP. While he made his notes, he didn’t notice the book slink slowly, almost imperceptibly, to the briefcase he held his notes in and when he did notice the book had moved, it was too late. The notes in his briefcase were gone, so was the paper money and receipts he kept in his wallet. Anything with the printed word, missing, and only the paper in the book remained. This resulted in a meeting with the site director, Dr. Jordan Lee Graham himself, and earned Steven three sleepless nights of leave while he worried that he might be fired, amnestitized or worse.  
“Dr. Graham will see you now,” paged the secretary. He hadn’t even seen a secretary to know one was watching him. The door the office opened on its own, revealing the site director’s office. It was large, well-furnished with mahogany wood trimming on all the cabinets, but the desk itself was oak, and Steven couldn’t quite tell this, because wood wasn’t exactly his specialty, but the desk stood out against the otherwise brown, dark room.  
“You like it? I had this desk when I was physics chair at Ohio state. Made it myself actually; woodworking is a bit of a hobby though, admittedly, I’m a bit old for that now.” Steven walked toward an empty plush chair in front of the desk and sat down. “Hands are a bit gnarled; it’s difficult to keep them in practice when I can barely use them. Let’s see, John Steven Jones, that’s uh, very normal name. What made you pick Steven?”  
“Well, my dad was named Jon.”  
“I noticed here you’re not a doctor of any kind. That’s quite unusual for a research position.”  
“Is that a problem sir?”  
“Goodness no, if being a doctor meant anything in this organization we’d be half the size and better for it. Let’s see, the incident report says that PR-114864 ate your notes in your briefcase.”  
“Yessir, I apologize.”  
“Don’t apologize, better we find out from your grocery list what this book can do than leave it alone in the library and come back on Monday to one, very large book. Actually, we’ve decided we’d like you to lead testing on this book, see if we can find a pattern to its madness, we’ve proposed some protocols, but we’d like you to implement them, and see if you can come up with some novel ideas.  
Steven nodded. This was the site director saying, “Here’s your chance to show you’re one of us, don’t screw it up.” Still, it was Thursday now and testing wouldn’t start until Monday, which gave him plenty of time to come up with some protocols. First, however, he needed to update the provisional entry and, finally, a title.

“The Book that Eats”  
Secure Contain Protect  
Provisional Item No. PR-114864  
Description:  
PR-114864 is a leather bound journal measuring 6 inches by 9 inches made by the Conneticut Leather Company in 1974. It contains 300 pages of archival matte paper with a silk ribbon. Each of the pages continuously change their contents so that nothing can be read or interpreted from it. Attempting to may cause nausea or vomiting. Tests with highspeed cameras are ongoing. PR-114864 should be kept out of reach of all important and classified information written on paper, as it will absorb and consume [any?] paper products placed near it.

Monday, 2 November  
Test 1  
After examining all quarter million highspeed photographs, it was discovered that nothing had been written in the Yi script in PR-114864, so the Yi script was chosen for this experiment. A python script randomly generated from Yi’s 1165 unique characters, over 100,000 words of text on approximately 29 pages. The pages were placed directly next to PR-114864. Result: PR-114864 moved imperceptibly slowly towards the pages. When PR-114864 came into physical contact with the pages, the paper began to unravel at the edges and weave into the paper of the book. Picking the book up at this point showed the pages to be completely connected. The paper slowly receded into the book before disappearing completely.

Test 2  
Twenty-nine pages of emojis and Unicode characters were placed next to the book, which again consumed the paper in the same manner. During the absorption process, the paper was cut free to note the state of the paper. Samples were taken of the pages and results will be amended in empty field below. The paper was then allowed to continue being reabsorbed.

Test 3  
Python was used to generate a script out of basic shapes and each shape was substituted for a Japanese syllabic character. Twenty-nine pages were printed, as before, however this time, the text was sourced from Haruki Murakami’s 2009 novel, 1Q84, as opposed to being randomly generated. The result was the same as the first two tests, however, this time, the book waited four times longer to begin absorbing the paper.

Test 4  
Twenty-nine blank sheets of paper were left with PR-114864 overnight and the entire next day. The book did not consume the paper.

Thursday, 5 November  
Taking the high-speed photographs had been the easy part, it was a high-speed camera after all, it was its job to be fast. The slow part was, well reading wasn’t the right word, parsing through the results. The analysis of the previous photographs had been done already, and he hadn’t needed to start from scratch. It wasn’t as though he was doing it manually, but the python script for analyzing the writing was fickle and had many false positives. False positives he could handle, all he’d need to do is check those one by one. It was the false negatives he was worried about; because he couldn’t check them at all, not unless he wanted to use the next few months of his life reading a hundred thousand pages of gibberish. Still all he needed was one, er, true positive to prove the hypothesis that, somewhere inside the book, that information was in there still.  
The analysis wasn’t even a quarter of the way through when it hit upon “ꍣꃬ”. Steven had to double check that it was Yi, and it was, he was even able to locate those two characters beside one another in the original file he’d created with the gibberish Yi. The highspeed camera was, at least, fast enough to get multiple words and so this was decent confirmation of his hypothesis.  
Now the question was, if he could find more Yi, substantially more, maybe he could write an algorithm to decrypt the book from its pages. It had to be worth a shot, anyway. So before he’d even finished the examination of the current set of high speed photographs, he set up an appointment to use the camera, and to take, this time, as many photographs as he could store. Someone had encrypted this book to prevent its knowledge from entering the world, so whatever it held would be very, very exciting.


	2. The Containment Breach

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steven's first Containment Breach will be one of the strangest in site history

It was 1300 a month later when Steven decided it might be time for lunch. He’d forgotten to eat the previous day and left work at 1800 when the night shift manager sent him home so his team could use the workstation. He couldn’t remember how many pages he’d been through, but it was possibly on the order of ten million by this point, and the only information he’d managed to gather in the last month was the pages refreshed like a CRT television left to right and top to bottom. That had been a kind of important discovery, because it meant there must be some refresh rate, and thereby they might be able to take photographs that quickly, if they could calculate it.  
He hadn’t been able to, in the few days since he’d learned that. No camera in the entirety of Site-11 had a fast enough shutter speed to match it. Not only that, the faster cameras didn’t seem to do any better of a job than the slower ones. It was maddening, but so were anomalies; it was almost in the name.  
“Steve?”  
Steven jumped in his chair, “Ah Dr. Lilande!”  
“I told you to call me Lily. Did you also forget we were getting lunch at 1245?”  
“Will you be mad if I say yes?”  
Dr. Lilande laughed, “No, you silly man. You’re not the only one here who gets caught up in research.” Marianne Lilande was a broad woman, several inches taller than Steven, though that was hardly any feat. Steven hadn’t even noticed her when he started talking to her initially. He was just rambling in the cafeteria about the different properties of Knowledge Esoterica, and she’d been the only one remaining when he’d finished. He asked her out on a whim, realizing that whatever he was doing, he was doing right, and she’d said yes. She was one of those weirdoes who preferred being called by her last name, and Steven had always found those kinds of people to be very eclectic.  
“Okay, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do after this,” he replied, and she suggested coffee. Now they were onto lunch, and while it had only been a few times, things seemed to be going pretty well and his childish nervousness was starting to creep back in a bit.  
Lunch itself was fine, the food wasn’t important, which was good because the Cafeteria was beginning to shut down for the 1400 to 1700 break, and what was left were cold mashed potatoes, gross string beans in a liquid that probably counted as an anomaly itself, the hardest chicken wings either of them had ever eaten and a brownie, which was actually quite good since it was freshly made and this was when the deserts were made for dinner.  
“It seems weird that it could have a refresh rate at all, I mean, it’s a book, not a TV screen,” she replied gingerly peeling off some chicken skins.  
“I mean it’s an anomaly. There’s no telling what kind of properties it could have.”  
“Maybe it’s an interference pattern, like in quantum mechanics. What you’re picking up on the camera is just potentials in different areas of the book,” Lily suggested.  
“I studied linguistics, I have no idea what any of that means.”  
“You wear polarized sunglasses sometimes right?”  
Steven thought for a minute, “I don’t really ever leave the facility. You think I should put a polarizing film on the camera lens?”  
“It’s a thought.” Lilande said, sipping on the melted ice in her tea.  
A klaxon warning sounded, “Containment breach in the facility, Section C-7 room 52. Repeat containment breach in the facility, Section C-7 room 52.”  
“Steven, that’s your lab,” Lily said, as though Steve had forgotten where he’d been 50% of the time the last month.

Steven couldn’t imagine how a book would leave containment, but it could move of its own accord, at least a little, so it was hypothetically reasonable to assume that it could move even further if it wanted to. Wanted seemed a bit strong of a word, since that assumes agency. Slime molds move of their own accord but don’t have agency, and they were more alive than books were in the most literal sense of the word alive. The trip from Section B’s cafeteria to Section C wasn’t difficult at least since the Cafeteria had deliberately been built on the same level as the service hallways to Section C and even better Floor 6 was just above the labs he was working in, and that was good news as it meant the monorail ride over would be the longest, most tense part of the journey in which he could imagine the worst outcomes. However, of all the terrifying things he’d imagined on his way over, he wasn’t quite prepared for the containment breach itself.  
The book itself was fine, it was locked in its case where he’d left it before lunch, to make sure it didn’t wander off and gobble up his notes again, but site security surrounded the breach, an old man who had, apparently, broken into the facility, about forty meters underground and three kilometers from the nearest entrance.  
“I’ve already explained to you, sir, if you’ll let me in, I’ll just grab my book and be gone.”  
“Everything here is property of the Foundation. Move away from the door and surrender yourself to custody or we will open fire.”  
“No you won’t shoot me.”  
The security officer did, in fact fire, and missed, with the rounds impacting the wall behind the old man.  
“Young man, would you please tell his brigand to cease his hostility. I’m only trying to get my book back.”  
“Your book?” Steven asked.  
“Yes, it’s a journal actually. My journal. Leather bound, gold embossing on the cover, says “Knowledge Esoterica.”  
“You—your that book is yours?”  
“Sorry I might have stuttered, yes, it’s mine.”  
Lily glanced sideways at Steven who was whiter than normal, “We can see what we can do; would you mind coming with us for a moment and answering some questions?”  
The old man nodded, “Certainly young lady,” and he pushed his way past the guards.

“I want to thank you for taking time to talk with us. I’m Dr. Marianne Lilande, and this is John Steven Jones.  
“So what’s your name?” Dr. Lilande asked.  
“Rolon Quiggins, ma’am.”  
“Thank you Mr. Quiggins—“  
“Rolon, ma’am.”  
“Rolon, how did you get down this far?”  
“I walked all the way here.”  
“You walked past the guards, through the security checkpoints, and past the badge doors to get here with no one seeing you?”  
“Oh no,” Rolon laughed, “That’d be silly. I took the hard way here, not the long.”  
“What do you mean the hard way?” Steven asked, with a bit of sharpness in his voice.  
“That’s, kind of difficult to explain. You ever heard of quantum tunneling?”  
Lily nodded with a bit of excitement while Steven shook his head to indicate that was something that sounded a bit made up.  
“It’s a bit like that, except not really at all,” Rolon didn’t explain.  
Lily wrote some notes while she asked, “How is it you weren’t shot back there?”  
“That guy missed me completely.”  
“How? He shot at you point blank, he couldn’t have missed.”  
“Yes, that does seem rather improbable but he definitely didn’t hit me,” Rolon replied.  
When Rolon spoke, it was with a bit of a folksy, disarming charm. Lily was too professional to giggle but Steven felt she was suppressing it, as though he was funny or attractive and, as someone secure in his sexuality, Rolon definitely was not. He looked homeless, with a beard frazzled on every hair, tied in knots in places and big bushy eyebrows that had never been waxed before. His clothes were ragged and tattered, threadbare in some places.  
Lily stopped asking questions about Rolon’s nature, which was a shame since Steven found his presence more intriguing than the book at the moment. “So how did you manage to locate your book?”  
‘Your book,’ that was a bit presumptive Steven thought to himself. Lily really did have a way with people.  
“Boy, that’s kind of a long story, a really long story. I always know where it is, no matter where I am.” He fiddled with a large hole in the pocket of his jacket, “The bugger has a nasty habit of running off sometimes.”  
“Where do you think you lost it?”  
Quiggins scrunched up his wrinkled face to think, “I last remember taking notes in a coffee shop in Lot, Patagonië.”  
“I’m not sure where that is. Could you show me on a map?” Lily asked, and brought up a world map on her computer and turned on the ceiling projector. Quiggins stood and walked over to the wall and pointed to a spot on the San Jorge Gulf. “I’m not seeing it,” Lily said. “Is it near Comodoro Rivadavia?”  
“Hm, yes, sort of, I suppose if you put one world on top of the other, otherwise they’re actually both quite far away from one another, in a very strict sense.”  
“What did you mean by world? Like another dimension?” Lily asked.  
“I wouldn’t call it that. Makes it sound like low grade science fiction. They got the normal three dimensions there, too. Time also but yeah.”  
“Wait so you’re, what, a planeswalker, like in Magic the Gathering?” Steven had played this card a little too close to his chest, so to speak. Lily knew he must be some kind of closet nerd, but couldn’t get him to admit to being a fan of any particular series.  
“Is that some nerd fluff? I don’t know? Maybe?” he answered.  
Lily interrupted, “So I just did a search for your name, and I’m curious is this you? Rolon Quiggins, born December 3rd 1952? Says your team placed fourth in the 1972 Munich Olympics’ Men's K-2 1000 meter.” On his Wikipedia page was a photograph of a man who could possibly pass for this interloper. He was clean shaven, and old, but in a more dignified way.  
“No, that man isn’t me. Although, I see that he did just as well as I did. Chilcott was sour about that for years, even though we were the only team that placed. We didn’t even qualify for the Montréal games, got beat out by Barton and Deyo.”  
“I should have figured that Chilcott was your brother. Would have been odd for two people with that last name to just be on the same team.” This was a tactic Steven knew Lily was using, to get to know people so they feel comfortable and unguarded around them. It was quite effective.  
“Dad would get violently drunk when we were kids, so Chilcott would take me and we’d take dad’s canoe off on Rum River and we’d spend the night on Goose Poop Island.”  
Steven hadn’t really been listening, though Lily had been enraptured with Rolon’s story. He couldn’t even verbalize the thoughts he was having right now, until something he could comprehend tripped his tongue, “There are other worlds.”  
“Uh, yeah, buck, there are,” Rolon replied, interpreting the statement as a question.  
“Are there an infinite number of them? How different are they? Are the laws of physics the same everywhere else? Is every possible thing true in some useless, meaningless way? Is quantum immortality real?”  
“Woah buck, slow down, those are a lot of really esoteric questions all at once, and sad to say I don’t know all of them.”  
“Well,” Lily felt this might be a good way to turn the subject to the book, “What’s with your journal? Just your personal logs, or is it data?”  
“Hm, now that’s a big question. It’s not nearly that organized, no ma’am. Just my thoughts at any given time, important information I might want to refer to later.”  
“How does it work?” Lily wasn’t sure her superiors would want her telling some random person about an anomaly, but the old man was rather anomalous himself and did seems to have a connection to the book, so likely there wouldn’t be anything about it he wouldn’t know?”  
“Well, when I have something to note, I write in it, like, y’know, journals do.” Rolon explained.  
“How are you able to read it, though?”  
“You haven’t read it?” Steven would have sworn that Rolon’s intonation had changed dramatically, but Lily didn’t seem to notice, “I think I might have made a terrible mistake.”  
“How do you mean, sir?” Lily asked.  
“I was under the impression you’d read the book already.”  
“I’m afraid we can’t seem to interpret it at all. The words tend to change before your eyes, making it impossible to focus,” she replied.  
“Oh, I can show you,” he said, “if you’ll bring it in.”  
Lily nodded in agreement and pressed the intercom button to ask for the book to be brought into the room. It was a few minutes before the book arrived despite being quite close by, “We had to take some precautions to keep it from eating.”  
Rolon chuckled to himself, recalling some old memory of, perhaps, the last time the book had gotten out of his sight. “It likes to wander off and seek the company of other books. Afraid I’m never quite enough for it.”  
“Won’t it eat them?” Lily asked.  
“Oh no, that would be cannibalism. Paper is one thing, but eating a book would be like dogs eating dogs. What a world.” The book arrived and Lily immediately handed it to Rolon without so much as a pause. “What have they been feeding you? He started pulling sheets of paper out of it, the same ones Steven had put in it, along with his missing receipts and a twenty dollar bill he’d assumed he’d lost in the wash.”  
“So how do you read it?” Lily asked.  
“Oh, uh, you don’t.” Rolon replied, “But I want to thank you for returning it to me. Now I’ll be on my way if you don’t mind.”  
Lily looked as if someone had just punched her right in the solar plexus, she couldn’t speak at all, so Steven took it upon himself, “Actually, we kind of do mind. The book isn’t going anywhere.”  
“I’m not leaving without my book,” Rolon said.  
“Well then you’re not going anywhere either.”  
Rolon laughed. Steven was 5’ 5” and 135 pounds soaking wet. Rolon was an Olympian and beneath his ragged clothes was the body of that god still. “How do you intend to stop me?”  
Steven didn’t know. Of course he didn’t, it was pretty obvious to the both of them that Steven was making a hollow, empty threat. He didn’t have the clearance to know of any kind of anomalous restraints that could even possibly keep the old man here, and there would be no guarantee it would work if he had them, but before he could even attempt to make good on that threat, Rolon began to speak again.”  
“What’s that?” there was no one talking, other than himself, not that Steven could hear, “is that so? Alright, Steven was it? I’m staying.”

Dr. Graham fiddled with the Newton’s cradle on his desk. It was anomalous, apparently violating entropy, but was so absolutely useless that it had been reduced to the desk toy it was. That said, he did find it fun to pull the ball to its apex and watch the ball on the far side hit that same height and never the two lose their kinetic energy.  
“Ah Steven, thank you for arriving so promptly,” the site director didn’t look up from his toy, thinking how if only he could fit a copper coil around the toy, he could charge his phone in a less easy, though more energy efficient way.  
“Thank you for having me,” Steven was, naturally, pretty nervous about this meeting. Not that he had any reason to be, since the containment breach wasn’t his doing, and he’d effectively prevented a second containment breach so he could probably expect praise, but no one goes to the Site Director specifically to be praised.  
“First of all, good work handling the breach the other day. You really did an excellent job convincing the anomaly to stay.”  
“I don’t know about any of that sir.”  
“I know you probably don’t think you did anything special, mind you, but the book’s keeper says you were instrumental in keeping him around. So props to that. But I didn’t bring you here to praise you. You have Level 2 clearance, correct?”  
That was true; there was a lot which Steven was not privy to just by his rank in the organization, though, on some level, he understood that there might be unthinkable reasons why it was necessary to keep him uninformed. “Yes sir.”  
“Not anymore. You and Dr. Lilande have been granted Level 4 clearance,” the director slid a new badge across the table to Steven. It looked a bit like his old badge but there were superficial differences in logo placement and how the text was formatted. “If you’d surrender your old badge please.”  
Steven was a bit attached to his old badge, but there were dirty places on the edges and replacement badges were a hassle to get and came out of your paycheck so partly he was to be rid of it. “Okay sir, but why?”  
Dr. Graham told him.


	3. Christmas with the Quigginses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Steven becomes accustomed to the strange old man, he gets new standing orders regarding him.

Secure Contain Protect  
Provisional Item No. PR-114864  
Description:  
PR-114864 is a leather bound journal measuring 6 inches by 9 inches made by the Conneticut Leather Company in 1974. It contains 300 pages of archival matte paper with a silk ribbon. The cover is embossed with gold lettering reading “Knowledge Esoterica”. Each of the pages continuously change their contents so that nothing can be read or interpreted from it. Attempting to read the book may cause nausea or vomiting.  
When photographed with highspeed cameras, the paper’s text will change as the image is made. Digital cameras will see snippets of letters, words or word pairings, while traditional cameras, which have not proven effective enough to image the book, will generate blurs on the lines where text was written.  
When placed in the proximity of loose leaf paper with any form of writing or illustration on it will cause PR-114864 to move toward and consume the paper, adding whatever is written on it to the changing text of the pages.  
On Thursday, 10 December 20XX, a humanoid entity appeared outside the lab in which PR-114864 was being studied. Entity matches the appearance and description of Olympian Rolon Quiggins, though a verification of Quiggin’s address in Albuquerque, New Mexico does show that the two individuals are distinct in some way. Entity, hereafter referred to as PR-114864-1 has indicated that he is, perhaps, from an alternate universe.  
The following information is restricted to only people with clearance level 4 or higher.   
PR-114864-1 is a possible Thaumiel entity and impossible to contain. To everyone of Level 3 clearance or lower, PR-114864-1 will be called a physical manifestation of PR-114864. PR-114864-1 is contained only by his apparent volition.

“Thaumiel? They think you’re magic?” Steven asked reviewing the new draft of the entry for PR-114864, one which he hoped would earn it an official designation as SCP.  
“People tend to ascribe magic to phenomenon they don’t understand,” Rolon replied, not looking up from writing in the aforementioned book.  
“If it’s not magic, why don’t you just tell us how to read it?” Steven asked.  
Rolon paused in his writing, but didn’t turn around to face the young man, “I don’t believe that would be a very good idea.”  
“Because you don’t trust the foundation,” Steven said in a way that he could easily have ended the sentence with “me” instead.  
“I’ve no doubt that if the Foundation had ever learnt the secrets of this book, I would have already known. Mind you, the only reason I allow them to try is that I know they cannot or perhaps—”  
“Perhaps what?”  
“It didn’t work out so well for them. Their ambition is limitless, they would have no trouble exploiting the book, if they could and they won’t because they didn’t,” Rolon slammed the book shut and placed it in the bureau serving as his desk.  
“Can you be so sure?”  
“I am many things, but never unsure.”  
Steven realized he wasn’t going to learn to read today and changed the subject, “They think you’re an existential threat to them, you know?”  
Rolon pressed the button to make a cup of coffee in the room’s generic K-Cup maker. He wanted tea, but the foundation only had coffee, so he insisted on taking all the best ones and the site’s personnel had let him, whether they told themselves it was because they couldn’t stop him, or because they were allowing this, Rolon knew they couldn’t stop him and assumed they probably knew this too. “To people like the foundation, everything is an existential threat. The more they know, the more danger they put themselves in.”  
“Knowledge isn’t inherently dangerous you know.”  
“Question, what’s an infohazard?” Rolon asked.  
Steven didn’t answer. He’d only just learned about them in the last week. There was something terrifying and fatalistic about the idea of an evil idea. Not one that was just a bad thought, but one actively and maliciously targeting people. It reminded him of Roko’s basilisk, an idea so dangerous that after it was posted on the Less Wrong community message board, the board owner Eliezer Yudkowsky immediately deleted the post and banned all discussion about the idea. Roko’s basilisk had seemed very silly at the time, after all how could it know your beliefs in the past, but there was SCP-4285, which amounted to autonomous clip art that, from the description he’d been given, sounded like a Bill Wurtz video come to life. There was also SCP-1314, which sounded like math that simulates a universe, which could have been fine just by itself, but causes the equations to run in the human brain, until they die. And these were just the ones he knew about. There were probably way worse ones only Level-5s were privy to.  
“In the story of Adam and Eve, they are ruined with the gift of knowledge, no longer able to live their lives in tranquility,” Rolon continued.  
“I always thought of Satan in paradise lost as the secret hero of the story,” Steven replied. “He overthrows a tyrant to give humanity the ability to choose.”  
“And how well has that worked out for us? You’ve no idea how many universes I’ve been to, ended by the hubris of humans and their inability for their morality to keep pace with their knowledge. You give people the power of the atom and what do they do with it? Weaponize it, of course. Sure, from this you get radio medicine and nuclear power, but even those come at a cost. The knowledge in this book? Some of it could outstrip any fantastical notions humanity has about its place in the universe.”  
Steven considered this and thought about it for a moment, “Oh, so the book is an infohazard.”  
“No, Steven, it’s much worse. It’s an Achilles heel that humanity has always had, knowledge.”

A few weeks went by and life returned to a kind of normal. Steven stopped studying the book that eats for a while, waiting on official designation of the object, though he was to keep the site director appraised of Rolon’s actions. Rolon, for the most part, wrote in his book at the bureau across the room in lab 47. Occasionally he’d pick at Steven’s brain, but for the most part, Steven thought of him as an emotionally distant cat, ever present but unconcerned with the middling details.  
A week before Christmas, Lilande had asked Rolon to be her steady, which received an immediate overzealous “Yes.” Steven didn’t know it before, but Lilly’s parents were quite old when they’d had her, and she herself was nearly 35. Her mother, though alive, was in an assisted living facility, unable to recognize her own daughter due to early onset alzheimer’s. Her father had died of a heart attack the previous year in the same facility, and that just left her. Steven, though his parents were alive and well, was no longer talking to them. They’d always been part of the Church of Christ, but when he lost his faith in college, he immediately found himself disowned. It was part of the reason why he couldn’t continue studying computer science and never earned more than his graduate’s degree. Perhaps out of some fondness for the old coot he invited Rolon to Christmas dinner with the two of them.  
“Will the Foundation let me go?” Rolon asked.  
Steven hadn’t even considered the question, “Can they stop you?”  
“Good point,” Rolon didn’t want to admit he was more concerned about Steve’s safety.  
And so it was that Rolon celebrated Christmas for the first time in several hundred thousand years. 

Containment Area-179 looked rather normal, at least, as far as containment areas went. The site was as rural as one could get in Massachusetts, down a service road off of a poorly maintained dirt road with nothing marking its location other than the microwave tower over which the containment area was built. Though the tower no longer was used to receive television signals, it always received updates from the Foundation, and it was always in contact.  
Underneath this relic of a bygone era was another, a wooden door from an old brownstone basement made, nearly 200 years ago. Nearly noon on Christmas Eve, the door was opened as it was every day to complete the arcane ritual. Behind the door another world, a pocket dimension, had somehow connected itself to the doorway. Within a series of seven pillars carved with bas reliefs stood three stories tall.  
A man entered the room holding a chicken, dressed in orange, followed parade of foundation members and one entered through the door and began walking around the pillars widdershins with the last person in line, the celebrant, throwing holy water with every other step toward the center. After the entire area was covered, the celebrant spoke, “Seven seals, seven rings, seven thrones for the Scarlet King.”  
The man in orange took the aspersorium and aspergillium from the celebrant and decapitated the chicken with an obsidian knife, draining his blood into the aspersorium that held the holy water, walking in a clockwise direction this time, throwing the blood and water mixture into the center, same as the celebrant had done before. After the pillars had been circled once again, the orange man poured the mixture of blood and water over the altar in the middle and spoke, “Blood for the Old Gods; water for the new king.”  
Not far below their feet, the roots of the pillars ended in chains, only one of which connected to the grotesque monstrosity occupying most of the giant cavern. It took in the blood and exuded fear, and continued to slumber for another day. Great pronged horns the size of redwoods tapped at the chain still connected to his body. Whatever material it was made of, it had nearly completely broken through its weld on one of the links. Soon, he would be free. He could subsist on these chicken nuggets as long as he needed to. His time here was measured in days, not years and somehow, the celebrant, as he closed the door knew this.

Lilande kept a very tidy home. She had no pets, and so the air was refreshingly clean, a fact for which poor, sinusitis ridden Steven was all the happier about. Rolon didn’t eat, normally, not that he couldn’t, but mostly he didn’t want to. But he did, because this was about assimilation. Sadly the food brought him no pleasure, and while he could tell what it tasted like, he couldn’t experience the taste to know if he enjoyed it. Of all the parts of his long past former life he missed, eating was maybe the biggest. Chilcott had no hobbies other than canoeing, but Rolon had loved cooking and made delicious healthy meals for his older brother multiple times a day to supplement their training. In fact he really regretting not even thinking to make something for the two to eat, though they did say they would take him up on that offer someday, and he promised to fulfill it, no matter what.  
“Is Santa Claus real?” asked Lilly, not in a childish way, but as a matter of academic curiosity.  
“Wouldn’t the Foundation have a note about his existence?” Rolon asked back, knowing full well the answer.  
“No, we don’t have anything that could possibly be the Santa Claus children believe in, which, I don’t know, is kind of a bummer?” she giggled, it had been a silly question.  
“Well, I mean I’ve met Santa Clauses before. There’s a lot of variety there, but I don’t know if there’s one here, in this universe,” Rolon replied  
“How could you not know?” Steven asked.  
“I don’t know everything, Steven. I only know what I know, and as good as your foundation is, they only know what they know. It’s totally possible you have a Santa Claus and he’s so perfect at his job he’s never been seen by anyone able to muster enough proof or has been able to completely and perfectly circumvent any attempts to locate him.” Rolon felt this was a very boring hypothetical. “One Santa Claus I met was two people fused into one, St. Nicholas of Myra and Odin Allfather. That was one eclectic guy, I gotta say.”  
“Did they have to fuse to save Christmas from the giant anime villain?” Steven asked.  
“Friggen nerd, but yeah, that’s about the size of it.”  
“Did Jörmungandr release its tail and begin Ragnarök?” Lilly asked.  
“If you’re asking if Santa died in Ragnarök, I can tell you I don’t know and can never know that. Anyway, that might have been the last time I celebrated Christmas was on that world.”  
“You never feel like checking up on your family every once in a while?”  
Rolon exhaled, or rather made an exhaling sound since he didn’t breathe. “Chilcott never makes it past 1985. After we kept failing to make the cut for the Olympics, he ah offed himself. Never gets married, never has kids, just keeps training and can’t live with himself for being not good enough.”  
“What about yourself? You have a counterpart here you know. Ever think of stopping in to say hello?” Lilly asked.  
“Sure, what am I gonna say to him? ‘Hi I’m you from another universe?’ I didn’t read science fiction, or really much of anything for that matter back then. He’d think I’m a loony.”  
“Say you’re a relative,” Steven suggested.  
“He ain’t gonna believe that horseshit. Dad didn’t have no family and we never knew mom’s family.”  
“So what I’m hearing is that he wouldn’t know if you were his mom’s brother?” Lilly pointed out, and it was a pretty good point at that.  
Rolon thought it over some more and it made a good deal of sense. He wouldn’t really have any way of knowing who his mom’s family was without having lived as long as he did, and this Rolon was in his 70s, there was no way he could use a computer.  
“Alright, but you two are coming with me. I’m gonna need cover.”  
“Wait,” Steven said, “What do you mean; he’s in New Mexico! That’s 1500 miles away.”  
“I’m gonna show you my neat little trick, Steven. You can tell the Foundation all they want and they’ll never be able to figure it out. The entirety of reality is pockmarked with what I call nodes. These are pathways from one part of space and time to another. Most are microscopic, though I’m sure your foundation has found some rather large ones, possibly bound to a physical construct. That said, I can make them as big as I need to as long as I need to, so that I can pass through, and I can take you with me. So, put on your jackets, we’re going to travel.”  
Lilly had already started putting on her parka. It wasn’t likely snowing in Albuquerque, but it was night. Steven took a bit longer, asking if he was sure this was a good idea. But soon he was ready, and Rolon took each one by the hand and together they stepped forward through and the floor fell out from under them. Steven took it the worst. There was no up or down, there was no pull to a center of gravity, just him and an unspeakable, indescribable void, and suddenly, he was back on his feet, aligned with the earth. He turned to the side and began retching his Christmas dinner all over a bush.  
Rolon changed his appearance, to be more elderly looking, less subcutaneous body fat, liver spots, sparser hair, and he spat out his teeth, which didn’t help Steven feel any better. “Hold on jusht a shecond. Now where did I put toes false teef?” Rolon stuck his hands in pockets in his jacket and pants, searching around, until he found them. “This is why sharks are superior. Anyway.” He knocked on the door of the first floor apartment, and the person inside peered through their see-hole to the group outside.  
“Sorry to bother you young man, is this the residence of Rolon Quiggins?”  
“This is he,” came back the voice, this one more familiar to Steven and Lilly, not as worn by time.  
“I’m sorry to bother you at this hour on Christmas Eve, but my family were driving to visit relatives in the area, and I believe you’re my nephew.”  
The door opened and before them stood Rolon, about as they knew him, but clean shaven and with much shorter hair. The prominent bridge of his nose stood out even more without the facial hair. For a moment, the other Rolon didn’t say anything, but his wife replied, “Oh wow, you look just like him.”  
“I’m a little taken aback as well,” their Rolon replied, “Jim Clayton, I was Bonnie’s brother. This is my grandson Steven Clayton and his wife Lilly. We’re headed to her mother’s for Christmas, but I’ve been trying to find Bonnie for 60 years now.”  
“She died when I was a baby, sorry you missed her,” Rolon replied. He did have the same sense of humor.  
“I’ll live, Rolon,” ‘Jim’ replied. “I don’t want to keep you.”  
“Nonsense,” his wife replied, “we’ve got nothing special happening right now. If you’d like to visit for a minute, you’re more than welcome.”  
“Thank you for the offer, Mrs?”  
“Sybil.”  
The trio entered the apartment, which was spartanly furnished with photographs of the couples and hand knit doilies, on the far wall, a large crazy quilt covered the entire area from corner to corner, and a small, nearly ancient CRT television sat right in front of it, more like a table than a TV, with its cable box on top for easy reach, and a VCR. The tapes were likely hidden in one of the cabinets on the floor, antique furniture that Rolon recognized as having belonged to his father, and the only thing of real value his father had owned.  
“I never knew I had any aunts or uncles. I thought my parents were only children,” Rolon said processing the Christmas surprise.  
“Dad wasn’t good to us, so when your mom fell in love with your dad, they just ran off, never said goodbye or anything. Dad was livid, but she was 17 and there wasn’t much he could do back in the late 40s. He was much better behaved after that but never quite got over losing her. Never stopped looking for her either but she’d gone far away. It had never occurred to me that I could even try and find them until my grandson here said something. Figured we could probably use the internets to search public records and find her, and by god, man was right.” ‘Jim’ told the story so flawlessly it was easy to forget he was making it all up.  
“I’m sorry you didn’t find her sooner,” Rolon replied. “I never really knew her, but Chilcott always blamed dad for her death.”  
“I can’t even imagine,” Jim lied.  
The two spoke at length for a couple of hours before “Jim” decided it was time to leave. Stepping back through the node to Lilly’s apartment, Steven ran immediately to the toilet. “I appreciate this,” Rolon explained. “I think I really needed that. Lilly, Steven, I’ll see you at work.”

Two days later, Steven came in, looking like he’d just planeswalked for a third time. Rolon regarded him with a bit of eagerness? Was that right? “Steven you look like shit!”  
“I, uh, I was robbed Christmas night. I spent all of Christmas day filing police reports and talking with insurance companies.”  
“Oh god man, what did they take?”  
“Basically everything but my clothes,” Steven walked over to the Knowledge Esoterica and thumbed through the book absentmindedly, “Like anything I loved was gone and—”  
Rolon listened intently, with legitimate empathy, “And what?”  
“I can… I can read the book.”


	4. The One Where Rolon Fucks with the Site Director

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In an effort to take the heat off of Steven, Rolon decides to be, what one might describe in a very charitable, narrow way, helpful to the Foundation.

Rolon immediately took a piece of paper out and wrote, “Say you’re mistaken right now, or else.” Rolon put the paper in the Knowledge Esoterica.  
Steven nodded, “No, wait, my mistake, I’m just so out of it right now.” Rolon handed him a pen and some paper. «How is this happening?» Rolon put that paper too in the book.  
Rolon replied, “I mean, being robbed is stressful, I can understand that. I’ll tell you what, in a while I’ll go see if people won’t donate to help you out.” «Something fundamental must have changed in you while we were walking through spacetime.»  
“I’d really appreciate that. I don’t want to be a bother though.” «How can I study the book as other people see it if I can read it?»  
“It’s not a problem.” «I’ll figure something out. Just wait.»

Indeed it didn’t take long for Steven to find himself in the site dierctor’s office, behind the never tiring executive ball clacker, speaking into his hands to not show his mouth, for some reason. “Steven, just the man I was wanting to see.”  
“Well, you did page me overhead to see you.”  
“Indeed. I’m sorry to hear about your house being robbed on Christmas Eve. Very demoralizing, though I heard Dr. Meyers had taken up a collection for you. Donated a thousand myself, we take care of our own here.” Dr. Graham was more than well compensated for his job, and this was a tax write off, so it wasn’t nearly as generous as it sounded. Indeed. Dr. Graham had a bit of a two-faced personality, where he could praise someone in one breath and condemn them in the other. People were assets to him, game pieces on a giant board, and he knew exactly how to behave to get most people to move how he wanted. Moreover he knew from the hushed rumors at lunch how Dr. Graham really was, an angry ball of wrath that had, on more than one occasion, amnesticized a problem employee and dropped them in the Mojave desert.  
“Thank you sir.”  
“Now, that wasn’t the only extraordinary thing to happen on Christmas Eve, was it? Mr. Quiggins left containment to spend Christmas with you and Dr. Lilande.”  
“Uh, yeah, he did do that.”  
“Also, he was spotted by a field agent in Albuquerque that night, along with the two of you. You didn’t charter a flight, so could you please tell me how that happened?”  
“Sybil is foundation?” Rolon asked. The site director didn’t respond, “We talked him into seeing himself, when we found out he never had before. He held our hands and we uh… have you ever played Magic the Gathering?”  
“No?”  
“Well people in that can just walk from one dimension to another. Well they can only do it by themselves, they can’t do it with other people. Anyway, so for a brief minute you feel like you’re freefloating, I mean, I assume that’s what it’s like. Then I vomited in the bushes.”  
“Indeed. What did you see.”  
“I couldn’t keep my eyes open, sir. Not even the return home, it’s so disorienting.”  
Dr. Graham wrote some notes down. “That’s a shame, was hoping we could get some more from it.”  
“Perhaps he can let me travel with him again in the future. Might be able to suss out something from that.”  
“We’ll think on that. Say you haven’t made any more progress on that book have you?”  
“I’m afraid not, sir. All we know is it contains his writings, at least, and only he can read them.”  
“Ah I see, that’s too bad.” Dr. Graham struck through a line on his notepad, “do keep me informed of any progress, please.”

«You think he knows?» wrote Steven.  
«Doubtlessly. Perhaps I can do something about it. If I’m useful to him, he’ll probably layoff you.»  
«How do you propose to do that?»  
«These SCPs. I’ve been keeping my distance, and by all accounts this place seems a bit bare. Maybe I could get him answers.»  
«That sounds like a really, really bad idea.»  
«Nonsense. Now where do I read about the SCPs?»  
«Most of them are on a secure server, and you’d need a log-in to get them, and they could trace what you’ve been reading.»  
«Cool, so I won’t use your credentials. Be back later.» Quiggins picked his book up and disappeared into thin air.  
“Oh boy…”  
The corridors of the spaceship were unlit, clearly whatever used them didn't need the light to see, and that was fine by Rolon, because he didn't either. Did Steven know about this warship? Rolon figured he probably didn't. Not because Steven didn't have clearance to know about it, but because Steven wouldn't be willing to risk censure accessing information he was not privlidged to. That was certainly an understandable concern. Rolon could hear whisperings of things which happened to people who accessed confidential information. At best he could expect to be given drug induced amnesia and dropped off in the desert somewhere.  
Without lights, Rolon wondered what kind of control system this ship would even have. It was possibly controlled all by computer, but he was willing to bet that the people who made it probably had manual controls somewhere, even if they were redundant.  
The ship hummed with a number of sounds. Sounds from the antimatter generator constantly producing more and more of the stuff to power its weapons. Rolon made a note to take that offline as soon as he could. The ship was talking to itself, though, repeating instructions over and over the length of the thing, resonating with radio waves, "Unit is out of range of target: Proceed to planet #3 in system," it said in some alien language Rolon couldn't remember where he had learned it. Triangulum, he though.  
The ship replied, "NEGATIVE, REPAIRS NEEDED."  
Who was it talking to, exactly? Both sounds were coming from the ship itself. Was it talking to itself? Was it just repeating its last commands? These weren't the messages the file had indicated were being transmitted to it, so perhaps the ship was alive and just repeating what it had heard to remember it? That was a though.  
Rolon felt his way around for what could have been hours in a ship larger than a European city, until he found what he thought he was looking for, and started messing around a bit.  
The ship started saying a new thing, "Actually what I think I'd like is to go on vacation."  
"That's the ticket," Rolon screwed with the machine a bit more.  
"Oh that sounds lovely. I hear it's sunny all day long this time of year."  
The sound of the antimatter weapons died off as the ship began to rise out of the atmosphere, pulling against Jove's great gravity well, until it was free. 47 minutes later, monitoring from satellites in orbit, Randall McAllan, the Director of the BARRIER Project, soiled himself.

Dr. Graham was not a man known for change. He ate the same meal every morning, arrived at work the same time very day and read the same reports from the night shift about any changes of note. He was not happy when an old man with a wild graying beard swiveled around in his chair as he entered the room.  
“What are you doing in my chair?” Dr. Graham asked.  
“Well hello to you too, Site Director Jordan Lee Graham.”  
“That is Dr. Jordan Lee Graham to you, PR-114864-1.”  
“And that’s Rolon Quiggins to you, Dr. Director. You’d know if you ever came and visited.”  
Director Graham stared the old man down, but Rolon remained nonplussed. There was nothing Jordan could do to the entity and both of them knew it. “Alright, I’ll bite. What brings you here, Mr. Quiggins?”  
“I was wondering if you’d seen the news?” Rolon asked, turning on the television on the wall, that beforehand he’d turned to regular television instead of the director’s desktop computer.  
“NASA has confirmed just moments ago what amateur astronomers have been suggesting all weekend long, the largest storm in the Solar System, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has dissipated. For more we go to our senior science correspondent; John?”  
“Thanks Cindy. Jovian meteorologists are stunned and saddened today by the loss of the Great Red Spot, which has been a defining characteristic of the planet for at least the last 360 years. First discovered by Giovanni Cassini in 1665, the spot had been losing energy over the past few decades by mechanisms that scientists were still investigating. Its large metallic hydrogen core has no solid surface by which storms on Earth naturally lose their energy, but it’s hoped that the Juno spacecraft, which is currently in orbit around Jupiter, will be able to provide some insight. Its total dispersal while a probe was in orbit of it is fortunate, as we may be able to learn how large storms form like these on gas planets, and how they eventually wind down.”  
Graham just looked stunned at the old man.  
“Okay, in my defense I didn’t know about that Juno thing,” Rolon replied.  
“What did you do?” Graham asked.  
“You should check with Site-233”  
In a surprise move that shocked Rolon, Dr. Graham did just that, pulling up his phone, the special one with 16 keys instead of 12, and dialed 0011-672-AA-4501, and waited on the other end to pick up. The phone rang for a solid two minutes before someone on the other line picked up. “This is Sheldon Katz, Esq., Site-233.”  
“Hi, Mr. Katz, this is Dr. Jordan Graham Site-11, do you know anything about, I know this sounds crazy, a spaceship from Jupiter?”  
“Funny you should mention that, Dr. Graham. This morning as I was walking from my settlement to the site containment, there was, in fact, a massive city sized ship floating in the Amundsen Sea, and now I have an anomalous legal entity claiming that it is its property. Now you sound like a man who might know something.”  
Graham bristled, “I have a few ideas. Thank you for the confirmation Sheldon, I believe I need to contact the O5 council.”  
“Oh that’s cool. Well I need to contact our legal department to make sure we actually have jurisdiction.”  
Dr. Graham hung up and glared at Rolon. “I suppose you wanted me to land the damn thing in the middle of Lansing?”  
“Did Steven put you up to this?” Graham asked  
Rolon laughed, “Absolutely not, in fact he wrote me a very stirring letter begging me not to do anything rash or crazy. Besides he doesn’t have clearance for SCP-2399, so how would he have been able to help me here?”  
“What is it you want, Quiggins?”  
“I want to be an asset to the foundation. I figure I’m gonna be here a while, I should make myself useful. You’re welcome, by the way, that thing was set to sterilize the planet any day now. Look at it this way, now you’ve got the opportunity to study who sent that thing, why and find ways to stop them. I did dump the antimatter though. I know better than to trust children with fireworks.”  
“Is that what we are to you, Rolon? Children?”  
“I’m sorry, you’re right, that is unfair. Children are smart enough to understand that their actions have consequences. Your foundation is more like toddlers, who think only of themselves and can’t see more than a few moments into the future. You keep sticking your fingers in light sockets and asking how it is that things go so horribly wrong.”  
“No, Rolon, I don’t believe I’ll concede to your demands.”

“The answer is yes,” came the voice over the computer two days later.  
“You can’t possibly think this reckless old fool will bring us anything but disaster, Beacon” Dr. Graham countered.  
“My predecessor, Kagaku-san was never bold and reckless, and he mentored me to be the same. The entire Council were unanimous in this vote, and an immortal, invulnerable god on our side could definitely swing the tide in many thaumological crises. Even our D-Class personnel are a valuable resource, and you think we should send them in to a death trap when we know he’ll survive?”  
“We can’t secure his loyalty, sir!” Dr. Graham protested.  
“No, we can’t, but if he was to do anything to us, we would have no means of stopping him, but to that point, he could have already dismantled and destroyed us if he wished to.”  
“Beacon, don’t you think it’s possible that perhaps he’s biding his time, to strike at our weakest just for fun?”   
O5-3 chuckled on his end. “Does PR-114864-1 look like he’s biding his time?”  
Graham looked over at the old man who, for the last 48 hours had been sitting on his couch and watching television disinterestedly.


End file.
